Best Friends Through Eternity (6 page)

I bite down on my tongue so as not to cry out. This will be a different way to stand up for Jazz. I will stand in for her instead.

We read till the end of the period. Why do Romeo and Juliet fall for each other, anyway? And how so quickly and deeply? Why can’t they just settle for a nice cousin their parents choose for them?

Poor Jasmine.
I rush out when the period ends and catch up with her on our way to math. “They think I’m going out with Cameron,” I whisper.

“Seriously?” She sounds too shocked.

I feel like pinching her.

But she hugs me instead. “This is great. He can play along with that, and we’ll make sure my parents never know.”

“It’s perfect, all right.” I hug her back. This is why I’m here, after all, to stand up for her against these bullies. If I’m the victim, fine. It’s a way better reason to go into a coma. But another thought occurs to me. Only some events from before are re-occurring and some new things are happening. An altered destiny. Is it possible to alter destiny just a little more?

At lunchtime I leave my thermos of stroganoff in the locker and suggest to Max that we eat at the mall with Cameron and Jazz.

“Sure. We can have the three-side special at Wong’s.”

“I hate Chinese,” I say, but then reconsider. “Does it have any monosodium glutamate in it?”

“Oh plenty. Makes it taste good.” He grins.

“All right, then.” Everyone knows food-court Chinese isn’t authentic, not like they serve dog or cat or even shark-fin soup. It resembles real Chinese about as much as Mickey Mouse does a real rodent. There is no reason to avoid it. We stroll off the school grounds, my arm linked through Cameron’s. I have to admit, that feels good. He is definitely
taller than both Jazz and me, and he has broad shoulders and muscled athlete’s arms.

Max walks on Cameron’s side and Jasmine on mine. If her mother drives by right now, she might even call my mother to warn her about me going out with Cameron. Jasmine and Max look like they’re just chumming along. But no parents see us. Only the volleyball team.

I notice them huddled at the far end of the football field on the other side of the fence, watching us and puffing. Not from the cold, either. I can’t believe a bunch of jocks would do that to their bodies. They’re smoking.

I lean into Cameron just to make it look really good, and we keep walking.

In the mall, too, we continue along with Cameron and me attached to each other. I realize this playacting is my last chance at any kind of romance, too. But when we sit down at a table in the food court, boys across from girls, Jazz and Cameron don’t have to touch. The energy between them hums and pulses, a growing live thing. Our playacting has nothing to do with love.

They share a plate of bo-bo balls, and Max helps me order my sides. I discover spareribs in garlic honey sauce aren’t half bad. Too bad a pig has to die for them. The fried rice and the Cantonese chow mein are delicious. Little bits of animal flesh in that, too. This can’t be the way my bio parents eat. Dad once told me they were poor, starving even, and they definitely couldn’t afford meat.

Kim is right about a lot of things. I was so angry before and never realized it. This time through, it’s as if my fists are unclenching. And when I stop feeling so much hatred toward my bio parents, I begin to feel curious.

Pretending to be Cameron’s girlfriend feels pretty good, too, better than being linked to Max, the school geek. That is, until gym class.

Because of a presentation in the gym, the volleyball nets have been taken down. They need to be set up again. Mrs. Brown sends a couple of the girls from the volleyball team to get the poles and me and Zoe for the net. I should be safe with the teacher watching.

But as Rebecca and Gwyn join to lift the first pole from the storage room, I can’t get out of their way fast enough. They back out and “accidentally” swing it so hard that I trip over it, face-planting on the laminate floor.

“Oh no! Sorry! Paige, are you all right!” Emma sounds like she really means it.

Gwyn actually cries. The class gathers round in a concerned circle. No one but Mrs. Brown is fooled. The message is clear:
Mess with Van and your legs get smashed.

Mrs. Brown feels along my left shinbone, then my right. “Where does it hurt?” she asks.

“I don’t feel anything,” I answer, but I can see the welt across the front of my legs deepen in color.

“We should call your parents,” Mrs. Brown says.

“No, no!” They will take me to Emergency; they will
fuss. I’ll miss days of my life at home with my legs up.

“Let’s see if you can stand, then.”

I refuse Emma’s hand and gather myself up slowly. If I keep my weight on my heels, I’ll be fine.

“Gwyn, go get some ice from the office,” Mrs. Brown commands.

I sit out the rest of the period on the bench, legs stretched in front of me with ice packs on my shins. I count myself lucky. If I hadn’t tripped, I might have been in double casts.

B
y the end of the day, my legs throb and I can’t walk at a normal pace. All chance of hiding the incident from Jazz fails. “They bashed me with the volleyball poles,” I tell her as I limp off the school grounds with her.

Jazz nods. “Rebecca passed me a note in history. It said I better tell my friend Banana to keep her hands off what doesn’t belong to her. Or more than just her legs will hurt.” Jazz throws her arms around me and hugs desperately. “I’m sorry. I never thought they would do anything like this.”

“I did.” I shrug. “Some bruises, not a big deal. This guy means something to you, right?” Over Jazz’s shoulders I suddenly spot Vanessa heading for a low, black sports car parked on the street.

A woman with bright red hair stands near it, smoking.
Her jeans are a slim fit, and she wears thigh-high black boots with laces and a poofy white sleeveless jacket over a red sweater. The tires on the car look as fat as her lips. Her eyes squint hard against the smoke from the cigarette, the hardness a family trait. She has to be Vanessa’s mother.

Wow.
Imagine having a mom who actually fits and looks at home in the boutique styles. Mine wears jean dresses designed to hide her body, and her silver hair always parts in the middle no matter what kind of style the salon tries on her—my adoptive mom, anyway. Who knows what my real mother wears.

As Vanessa draws closer, her mother grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her, carping at her all the while about taking cigarettes from her purse. Vanessa must answer her back, and the woman winds up and slaps her.

Vanessa’s face sets into stone, even as a hand mark reddens on her cheek. The woman shoves her toward the car, and Vanessa scrambles in. The driver’s door slams and bright orange sparks hit the road as the car pulls away.

Maybe there are advantages to not looking like your mother. No one ever guesses Mom and I are related. Mom’s pink skin sunburns too easily, and beneath her jet black eyebrows, her faded blue eyes are rounder than my brown ones. But when Mom looks at me, her eyes are as gentle as her voice, even when she’s tired or annoyed. I wonder if my birth mother could be as patient. Would poverty make her as mean as Vanessa’s mom?

In a split second, a window has opened to Vanessa’s life away from school. Something in that view tells me she needs Cameron just as much as Jazz.

“He’s never going to go out with her again,” Jazz tells me, as though she knows what I’m thinking. “He’s told me that over and over. Whether my parents send me to India or those girls toss me into a ditch, Vanessa will not get him back.”

Toss her in the ditch,
I hope not. “Maybe you’re right,” I say. Something suddenly becomes as clear to me as that split-second window into Vanessa’s life. “For her, it’s not about getting him back, it’s about getting even.”

When we arrive at our usual intersection, Jazz offers to walk me all the way to my doorstep, but I tell her it isn’t necessary. I limp home, grateful to have at least this pain that proves my loyalty to her.

Nobody is at the house when I step in, and that aloneness decides it for me. I want to find out more about my birth family, and Mom doesn’t ever have to know. I don’t even take off my boots or coat, just hobble up the stairs, clutching the banister. I know where she keeps important documents. A metal box sits at the bottom of her walk-in closet in the bedroom. It has a latch on it but no lock. Their lives are contained in an open but flameproof box.

Any time I want, Mom will take me to China to get in contact with my roots—hasn’t she said that a million times? So why do I rush for that box in the closet, limping as fast as I can? Is it so that I can look in it before I change my
mind? All the hundreds of opportunities I had to search it before, I never bothered. Afraid of what I might find out. Or do I hurry so I won’t get caught by my mother?

Both,
I decide. I flick on the light and kneel down at the back among all the shoes, keeping the door open so I can hear if someone comes in. My mom keeps things in file folders, and I flip through them till I hit one that says “He Fuyi.”

A Chinese name. My Chinese name? I quickly pull it out.

Inside is a stack of papers. Of course, I never went to those Mandarin lessons Mom offered to send me to, so the characters don’t mean anything to me. The top paper appears to be a copy of a newspaper clipping from what looks like a classified section.

Across it is a row of baby pictures, each with a column of notes underneath it in Chinese script. All babies look alike to me, and in this strip the younger infants appear round-cheeked with closed, puffy eyes and nearly bald heads. Straggly black bangs, tiny noses, upside-down half-moon mouths, the toddler faces also have a lot in common. Their eyes seem to question, maybe even implore. How did my mom choose the little girl with no eyebrows? She’d circled my photo. Underneath the row, someone had jotted notes:

Finding Ad in the local newspaper. He Fuyi was found abandoned under the lamppost at the back door of the nursery of Hechuan SWI. She is in good health, nothing left on her when she was found.

So He Fuyi has to be my name. Two babies to the right of me, another toddler is circled, same eyes and bangs; she doesn’t have any eyebrows to speak of, either, but her mouth opens into an
O
. One word is scrawled beneath her:
Kim.
It’s Mom’s handwriting. I didn’t know we’d been adopted from the same orphanage. We may even have played together back in China. If only she had lived, we could still have been friends. To have someone who had been through all the same experiences as I had might have made me a different person.

There is a Certificate of Adoption, listing my parents’ names as adoptive parents and a date: July 14. My Gotcha Day, the closest thing to a birthday that I can celebrate. The next paper is a Children’s Medical Examination Record, but while the questions are listed in both languages, the answers are only in Chinese script, each character a little picture. I thumb through the pages and come to the final document. The header on this one squeezes at my heart: Certificate of Abandonment.

I skim the information, which is basically the same as on the newspaper copy. The last sentence stays with me. “We have tried hard but can’t locate her natural parents up to now. This is to certify that she is an abandoned baby.” Underneath in bold are the words Chongqing Hechuan District Social Welfare Institute and a date.

How many people can say they have been officially abandoned?

My throat tightens and I squeeze my eyes closed. I hear a noise. What is that? No time to cry about any of this. I shove
the papers back in the file folder and slip it back into the metal box, slamming the lid.

I run out of my parents’ bedroom but know I won’t make it down the stairs in time.

“Paige?” My mother stands on the landing. “What are you doing up here in your coat and boots?”

“Just had to go to the bathroom, Mom,” I answer.

“In such a big hurry?” She touches my forehead. “Do you still have diarrhea? Your dad was right. We should have gone to the hospital.”

“Relax. I drank a lot of water after gym class today.”

“But you look so … upset.” Mom stares at me intently. “Is something else going on?”

“No, nothing, I swear.” I meet her eyes. “Going down to do my homework now.”

“All right. I brought home some yogurt-covered raisins for you.”

“Thanks.” I wait till she turns away to start down the stairs. I don’t want her to notice my limp. At the bottom, I hang up my coat and set my boots carefully on the tray beneath it. Then I go to the den and sit at the computer. He Fuyi, my real name. I might have been a different person had I grown up with it. What does it even mean?

I open the Internet browser and type my Chinese name in, hoping for some glimpse of a family that could be mine. “He” had to be my surname and “Fuyi” my given name. But searching by “He” produces hits that refer to “He” as in the
pronoun. Searching under “Fuyi” produces some Chinese restaurants and other sites in script. When I use the whole name, I find sites that mention “He” as a pronoun right beside some guy’s first name, “Fuyi.” I give up in frustration and go to Facebook just to relax.